Guild Wars 2

There are two core problems to the matter:
1. People dont bother to even remotely inform themselves about those classes they see as bad or unworthy. Hence all the objectively wrong statements about druid in this threat that can be refuted by simply looking into the wiki.

2. The good builds for those classes are not exactly public knowledge, mostly not unified and often require more effort/class knowledge to be actually good. As a rule of thumb, most pugs have neither.
I play main druid in our fight oriented guild basically since HoT and when we are sometimes running blue and I manage the parties as lieutenant, even I, who knows about the effectiveness of druid healers first hand, will usually put druids in the trash party. If you dont know the people, you are not going to spend several fights to find out if they are one of the maybe 2% who dont play a trash build and are decent players. In comparison, a bad player with a cookie cutter guard build will still be useful.

I know it hurts to be rejected because of those reasons, but you cant put all the blame on the commander. Accept it and get a guild.

Just to adress some of the riddiculous statements in this thread:
1. We did the math, we did testing with dps meters: Healing druid clearly outheals support tempests by a large margin. Druid’s burst heal does not shine just at regroups, its the exact opposite! You push with the tag and provide burst heal during the clash/counterbomb.

2. It might be that over a period of time ele theoretically outcleanses druid. But ele does not have one skill that removes ALL conditions from your party, which can be super useful to counter a condi spike if you get caught in it. Also hitting seeds of life in avatar form on a mobile team is still very much possible if the commander does not chaotically change directions every second.

3. Most ppl dont know it, if you set your pet to passive it will actually survive in a lot of fights.

4. The comparison between ele and druids is useless as both fullfill different roles. 2 eles + 1 druid / 2 druids + 1 ele is atm always superior to 3 eles or 3 druids. You want all of the following: Auras, boons, grace of the land, spotter – not just two.

While its technically possible to obtain asc gear in WvW, it is neither reliable nor in a timely manner. Within several hundred hours of WvW i have not gotten even close to a full set in drops and know of nobody else who did.
PvE is the only way to acquire either the drops (fractals) or the mats to craft directly (yes, you can also get the mats in WvW. is it even remotely comparable to PvE? No)

@BlaqueFyre.5678
How can you expect to be taken seriously in this discussion when you display utter ignorance regarding druid mechanics?

1. The superspeed stealth only applies after ending celestial avatar form. If you use it on “very short cooldown” you effectively forfeit the avatar form healing which severely impacts your sustain. Also you have to camp staff. See below.
2. Superspeed stealth and 33% base movement speed are mutually exclusive.
3. Astral force generation is independent from the actual amount of healing or damage done, it just differentiates between healing and damage, the latter generating half the AF. The staff is the only weapon generating both numerous healing and damage ticks in a way that one can use CAF on cooldown, which means using anything else (longbow) will severely cripple your sustain, even when running full magi.
4. All fast travel skills are completely countered by immobilize or terrain obstacles. Lightning reflexes being some sort of exception, albeit i would not count a 700 range backwards roll on high cd a fast travel or full disengage skill. Comparing that to thief mobility skills that are blink effects is intellectually dishonest.

So yes, Druids have to compromise in the same way. I grant you that the base healing levels of the CAF skills were too high so that you got a decent amount of sustain without running sustain stats, but fortunately that was fixed in the last patch.

emikochan.8504:

If they wanted to nerf boonshare in WvW why didn’t anet just buff boon removal/stealing?

Either way i’m happy cause i don’t raid or wvw and only play bad builds in spvp which get buffed every patch

Because it would not solve the problem, since boons in general are an inherent game- and sometimes implicit class-mechanic, not some special build to go for.

If you buff boon corrupt/steal to a level where it can keep up with the insane boon uptime provided by boonshare, they would completely annihilate builds that have a normal amount of boons and uptime. As well as classes that were designed and balanced around heavy boon usage (e.g. Ele).

As crazy as it sounds, the only answer to boon corrupt/rip/steal would be to play even more boons to at least have a chance on keeping some stability or resistance up.

WvW needs less siege-centric gameplay, not more.
It’s a No.

Reh.5986:

Amenaza.8346:

Nuzt.7894:

trueanimus.4085:

I know that druids have a TON of helpful skills like area cripple with barrage, piercing arrows, water field and heals in druid form.Snip.

Their heals are sub par, their fields clunky, their arrows usually do more damage to themselves than the enemy if you are fighting anyone remotely competent, basically and Ele can still out preform any druid any day of the week in a large setting.

No. We have tested this a lot within my guild using dps meters. If played correctly, the Ele’s healing does not even come remotely close to what Druids can achieve. I am talking ~1,2mio healing Druid vs ~350k Ele in a 6min fight ~20v20. This however requires the group to stay tight and focused, which is often not the case in a public setting. You are absolutely right about the arrows though. I would also agree that you would still rather have 3 eles instead of 3 druids but 1-2eles + 1-2 druids > 3 eles, definitely.

Eles have better water fields. Water fields are just stupid easy for a hammer train to blast. Catch is ele can pull this off while doing stupid amounts of aoe dmg and cc.

Druid does some things well but suffers in ways similar to engi. Heavy/light classes can do more and better for the roles needed in large scale.

We made our tests, no amount of theorycrafting is going to change the empiric numbers.
Still, better water fields? Have you even read CAF 4? A field that has way better healing on its own, can be deployed twice within short succession and moves with the train? Sure, the Ele thing is superior when ppl are swarming around like chicken, but when the train stays compact, there is no way the ele fields outheal the druid.

In the end, I dont really care if I convince anyone here, we will probably never meet in the same squad. It works for my guild and me, thats what matters. I was giving genuine advice to the OP and wanted to correct a bit of information i know to be wrong.

Substance E.4852:

If you were going to berate everyone as “doing it wrong” but then not share “the secret correct way” of doing it, you wasted you time writing that wall of text.

Find me a serious WvW guild that shares all their builds to the public. Its also not the “one true way” but a concept that works for us and firmly integrates our druids in our zerg. Even if I did share it, there would be some aspects that make no sense in a vaccuum and rely on the party composition we designed.
Yes, the wall of text might have been unnecessary and can be summarized as “yes, druid can have a good place in the meta but you have to work way harder for it and i dont blame pub coms who dont want to put up with that”, which is my message for the OP. However, I’d rather give you my reasoning which you can easily skip, than some half baked answer with no actual weight.

Nuzt.7894:

trueanimus.4085:

I know that druids have a TON of helpful skills like area cripple with barrage, piercing arrows, water field and heals in druid form.Snip.

Their heals are sub par, their fields clunky, their arrows usually do more damage to themselves than the enemy if you are fighting anyone remotely competent, basically and Ele can still out preform any druid any day of the week in a large setting.

No. We have tested this a lot within my guild using dps meters. If played correctly, the Ele’s healing does not even come remotely close to what Druids can achieve. I am talking ~1,2mio healing Druid vs ~350k Ele in a 6min fight ~20v20. This however requires the group to stay tight and focused, which is often not the case in a public setting. You are absolutely right about the arrows though. I would also agree that you would still rather have 3 eles instead of 3 druids but 1-2eles + 1-2 druids > 3 eles, definitely.

I main druid in a hardcore WvW guild (size 15-25 per raid) on FSP. The statement that Druid is somewhat unplayable or does not bring as much to a zerg as other classes is simply false, even in an open raid with 50+. Although I won’t share my build, my general advice is to not play or understand it as a ranged class and forget all that stuff one would associate with a “ranger”. People in this thread have already hinted in the right direction.

That being said:
1. Almost all rangers/druids I usually encounter in a zerg (not including roaming) are absolutely worthless, bad players with bad builds, so just speaking from experience – if I had the choice between a random guardian/warrior/necro/mesmer/tempest and a random ranger, I would always choose the former. Metabattle also plays a role here – the aforementioned classes have very efficient and easily accessible builds available which are effective even if the player skill is quite poor. Not the case for Druid.

2. Their tag, their rules. Yes, I know it sucks to be excluded due to prejudice and I also know that most public commanders are unaware of the potential a druid brings to the frontline, but “play how you want” does not mean “ordain how other ppl have to play”. If they dont want to play with a druid, however stupid the reason for that, it is their decision.

3. Picking off stragglers with pew pew was a quite effective thing to do back in the old meta where focus parties were still a thing. At the moment, not so much.

4. As I said, Druid has amazing potential, but it is way harder to implement. It requires people to stay focused on tag, multiple Druids dont scale as well as i.e. multiple guardians or necros and they most of the time need additional stab from guards. It puts more restraints on party building and more responsibility on party members to do their job well. 3 uncoordinated Guardians + X is way safer than 2 uncoordinated Guards + 1 Druid + X.

My final advise: Get a guild and dont rely on people to change just because you want them to.

You after 3 years still care about a completely pointless scoring system.

You feel in the right to commandeer public teamspeak channels because the commander does not come to save “your” tower.

You have used the phrase “true way of playing WvW” and were actually serious.

You feel entitled to special privileges within your community and that the server owes you something for your sacrifices nobody asked you to make.

Cobrakon.3108:

I totally support a linux port. People are feed up with Windows policies and privacy concerns. I would never use windows again if linux had better game support. I really really want windows 7 to be my last OS from Microsoft, that is, if they continue their bad habits.

No they are not. If “people” actually would care about privacy concerns, Facebook and Google would cease to exist overnight. Nerds like you and me who value their privacy and are willing to accept some inconveniences in the process of keeping it are the clear minority, which means it will never be profitable to cater to our needs.

In addition, it’s hard enough already for PC developers in a world of so many different drivers and hardware – I can’t imagine how it would be if they also had to take the myriad of linux distributions into account. When it comes to hardware and support, Linux is the worst, especially for not so tech-savy users.

Even I, having a university degree in computer science, struggle sometimes to set up linux on a laptop with all internal modules working (e.g. WLAN) . For the consumer, the reasons or “whose fault is it” do not matter, they want kitten to work with as little effort as possible.

In the end it mostly boils down to the biggest mistake in WvW from HoT: Revenants. It’s the rev that puts out a crazy amount of boons (resistance especially), increases boon duration like no other class. And its also the rev’s insane ranged damage (combined with out of this world condition application) that forced melee trains to go super dense, all boons murderball.

lil devils x.6071:

Players seem to think that having a mixed BL meant people could just play where they want and how they want. That works for only players who do not hop to all maps and defend an attack all objectives and care about the score and balance. For those players, the game mode is unplayable/ broken with mixed BLs and you are then giving them a broken game mode all of the time with mixed BLs rather than having the option of ever having a playable game mode at all.

I wonder how players that care about score and balance are still in this game while the utterly broken scoring/off-time population mechanic has not changed in years (besides some alibi ppk thrown in).

Hexinx.1872:

My support is for the longevity of WvW. I don’t see it ever growing while remaining stale with the alpines. While my personal prefence is for me to play on the Alpines or EBG, I would rather support bring in more maps to provide options. Who knows, maybe one day I will like DBL. Maybe providing avenues for all players who play WvW is the right decision. We sure as hell are not filling up the maps with only DBL’s or only Alpines. And I’m in t1 NA. Been in since BWE1 on my other account, and to be honest, we can all run alpine blind folded by now.

Also, if we, as a community show support for the effort and work the company is putting in, we may be able to get into a position where we may get a new map every few years. Hell, I’ll throw gems or cc if it will give WvW half the attention pve players get.

Not having a new map/ABL becoming stale never was and is not the main threat of this game mode. The problem is 3 years of full neglectance regarding:
- Scoring system/population balance (see above)
- Timely balance changes with WvW in mind (Coalesence of Ruin, Perplexity…) and class balance overall (months/years of GWEN)
- Rewards in comparison with other game modes
- Impact of gear progression without reasonable means of acquisition (also point above)

Because the implementation of a poorly designed new map can make things actually worse, I could live with ABL (maybe some tweaks) for the rest of this game’s lifespan as long as they put work into those points i have listed.

TheGrimm.5624:

Amenaza.8346:

Swagger.1459:

Just wondering, do any of you know why dbl was designed the way it was?

As nobody here could actually know this, I will give my educated guess.

Actually, we can. I will sound biased so trying to keep this neutral. But if you want to know where they might have been influenced by, scroll back into these forums to pre-hot and look at the posts that people were placing. They didn’t gather information from polls so that means their most direct source were these forums and reddit. Can’t speak for reddit but a lot of what they did and have done recently were items from those Pre-Hot posts. Reward tracks is a good example, was a recurring issue on the forums at the time. Same with some of the other things we have seen. Will stop there though. But if you are asking this question, your answer lies there. Good hunting!

That is still an educated guess. Knowing would require inside knowledge regarding the design process (aka access to Anets internal communication). Those people who legitimately posess that information are under NDAs and those who do so illegitimately probably wont post here.

Shadelang.3012:

Amenaza.8346:

Shadelang.3012:

Using the terrain to your advantage over gimmicks (like kiting in and ABOVE the cliffs near NE camp).

What do I get in EBG and ABL if I don’t want to deal with that? Oh their coming after me in the middle of this flat plain and Im not running a stealth class and there is no terrain that works to my advantage? Well better hide in this tower then.

Sorry to break it to you, but on EBG and ABL the kind of large group harassment you describe is perfectly possible, even without “cheesy stealth combos”. Ive done this plenty with DH or even vanilla guard, one of the most un-mobile class there is. It already is quite costly (in terms of time and effort) and disadvantageous for a pug zerg to chase roamers like that. Of course there is a risk involved and every roamer thats still left in this game knows that a roaming build worth its salt should have some sort of exit strategy.
What you ask for is the ability as a solo player/small group to severely impede larger groups with impunity, because due to the DBL map design in order to retaliate the enemy would have to run around for half a minute to just get on the same level of elevation as you. Does that sound fair in any shape or form?

Well I have to say you did a pretty good job cherry picking one part of my post to respond to while putting words into my mouth and completely ignoring the purpose of my post.

That part of my post is based off my own experiences. As I stated at the beginning of the post I do NOT claim to speak for any other player except for those I know and play with personally something some other people have not had the courage to do.

If your going to respond to my post. At least have the decency to not pick the one part of the post that was based on personnel opinion and experience. Of COURSE people are going to have different experiences. But choosing only one part of my post to rip at while ignoring the rest (Including as I said before the point of the post) is inherently dishonest on your part. As you take something out of context in order to portray it in a specific fashion to other readers.

I tried to condense the quote to make things more readable. Rest assured, I fully read and understood your point, it was not my intention to build up a strawman. However, I have read it again and still do not see, apart from the rant about posting behaviour at the end, any part of the post where you do not describe issues you are facing because of map design/terrain. Yes, you are describing different scenarios, but in the end it boils down to those issues. If you meant something entirely different, please enlighten me as it must have gone over my head.
My answer to that (while worded harshly and quite personal) is that exactly those additional options the DBL terrain brings are what a lot of people hate about this map, as it allows few players to have even more impact on larger groups which is frustrating on their side. Some might say “well then dont blob up” – i too mostly dislike anything above our guild raid size (15-25) – but in the end the “zergers”, which you imho correctly identified as the majority of players, are more likely to quit than to change their playstyle of choice. Which is what happened (of course there were several other factors at play) and will kill this mode for good if we allow it to happen again.

Also one thing about the “personal experience” part. If you talk about your experiences, there will be people who have other experiences (in this case me) that will refer to yours, more so if those two are opposed and especially if your experiences are the foundation to the argument you are bringing forth.
In case you dont want something to be discussed, dont post it.

Shadelang.3012:

Using the terrain to your advantage over gimmicks (like kiting in and ABOVE the cliffs near NE camp).

What do I get in EBG and ABL if I don’t want to deal with that? Oh their coming after me in the middle of this flat plain and Im not running a stealth class and there is no terrain that works to my advantage? Well better hide in this tower then.

Sorry to break it to you, but on EBG and ABL the kind of large group harassment you describe is perfectly possible, even without “cheesy stealth combos”. Ive done this plenty with DH or even vanilla guard, one of the most un-mobile class there is. It already is quite costly (in terms of time and effort) and disadvantageous for a pug zerg to chase roamers like that. Of course there is a risk involved and every roamer thats still left in this game knows that a roaming build worth its salt should have some sort of exit strategy.
What you ask for is the ability as a solo player/small group to severely impede larger groups with impunity, because due to the DBL map design in order to retaliate the enemy would have to run around for half a minute to just get on the same level of elevation as you. Does that sound fair in any shape or form?

Swagger.1459:

Just wondering, do any of you know why dbl was designed the way it was?

As nobody here could actually know this, I will give my educated guess.
It is no far-fetched claim to say that WvW has – over the course of 3 years – never been treated equally to other game modes, attention wise. At the same time, the players developed their own infrastructures for WvW, their own administration and their own “castes” (scouts, roamers, “ppters”, PuG leaders, fighting guilds, gvg) and thus developed the game mode further from its original concept. Those things dont show up on any metric Anet has at their disposal, they can only be aquired by many insiders (as there are many facets to WvW by now), which Anet does not have the resources for.

As a result, it cannot come as a surprise that the WvW development team (as far as it existed) over time became more and more disconnected with the playerbase. When they talked about WvW, they were talking about the concepts and visions from release, not the actual state of the art. There was an instance of one GM (Anet tag) raged in WvW at guilds doing a GvG at the windmill, telling them they were “destroying his game mode”, which speacs volumes about the level of disconnection present.

For “casuals” it is fun to fight with goofy gimmics, where you can win by pushing someone off the map or to have cool, sometimes random effects spicing up the fights (OS traps). More serious pvpers despise that as they spend hours designing their builds, honing their skills and want to compete based on that alone. As such it further adds to the problem that there are probably no serious pvpers in the Anet team. Almost nothing in this game was designed from the core to be a pvp thing, its all PvE and then adapted to pvp.

This is the core problem. The desert borderlands are perfect for people who are not really interested in engaging in even, skill based player vs. player combat. Horrible chokes/ledges, gimmicks like pop-up walls, jump pads or air ducts. When getting feared/knockbacked off a cliff is a bigger threat than the enemy bomb, we have reached Skyhammer-tier of competitive map design.

One guy on an arrow cart can lock down a pass on his own, one guy can pull the lever and unleash the airship, one guy can activate that shield generator to knock 20 ppl into the lava to their death, one guy can hold the air keep lords room against 10 attackers. Everybody can be that guy, everybody can be the hero. For the average PvE-developer, this is the dream. For fight oriented players, this is their worst nightmare.

As long as the fighters are a significant portion of the playerbase, there will be demands of removing DBL in favor of Alpine, as Alpine is considered a fair balance between fights and siege, whereas DBL was clearly built for the latter.

I main druid in a hardcore WvW guild and am very well integrated into our roster. It is in a really good spot right now. As posters before me, I will not reveal my build for several reasons.

First, all our builds are tailor made for our specific setup, on its own/in a vacuum my build will probably not be very useful to you.

Second, most serious WvW guilds will not share neither exact setup nor their build – some streamers are even concealing info such as lifetotals or boons when they run their raid build. There are hundreds of hours going into designing and testing a new build or setup and the result is the core essence of any such guild. It is about gaining strategical advantage over other competitors and sometimes also about finding the broken stuff before the rest does or ANet nerfs it. Some will even go that far to make or promote dishonest “informative” posts or class “guides” which, although providing a sometimes solid build, have the purpose to actually distract the “casual” mass of players (and also ANet) from the really strong synergies/combinations/archetypes. Alternatively they abuse the inherently flawed voting mechanic in reddit to prevent posts conatining “critical info” to gain any serious attention.

WvW was designed to resemble war and all warfare is based on deception.

Edit: My main point with reason 2 being: If you want to become a serious wvw player, you have to be able to theorycraft properly. You dont necessarily need to design all builds completely on your own, but gain a sense for potential synergies and the ability to think outside of one class and in the proper WvW dimensions. Most of the strong stuff is pretty obvious if you spend some time on researching skills/traits available to you in the wiki. Never disregard anything just because “it is not used” or “everyone knows is bad”. Only if you actually have found a better alternative.

1. So basically you want a single player game? I cant see any possibility for creating challenging group content that basically requires only one player to be competent. I also cant see how the new raids prevent you from teaching the mechanics to a new player. If you think the challenge makes everyone toxic…well guess again and get some friendly and reliable people to play it with. However I see your point regarding dungeons, although raids were never meant to replace them. The reward nerf feels kittenty even if I am partially happy for the fact that dumb zerk-corner-stacking does not yield the highest non-TP gold gain any more.

2. Yes, its horrible. Why they did not even think of an extra category is beyond me.

3. Sorry but this reads like you are just salty that you cant get the shinies because of raid, your statement is simply not true. Things like ascended armor or legendary weapons were basically unattainable for ppl primarily playing WvW or sPvP. While it is technically correct that one could obtain a legendary just by playing WvW, the abysmal rewards (depending on what you did in WvW before the remake you were sometimes lucky to get even and on rare occasions even lost gold – compare that to silverwastes) make this basically impossible for everyone but a tiny fraction of players with enough time and will.
A lot of skins and gear is locked behind specific content. Fractal skins and the Legendary Backpack are a “fractal only affair”. The new legendaries are a “HoT only affair”. Mawdrey is a “LS only affair”. Tons of stuff is event only and cant be obtained after the event is finished. The game is full of this – whether you like it or not, anet did with legendary armor what they always do with certain prestige items. How come it is suddenly unfair as soon as its associated with raids? Makes no sense.

4. – You can learn the mechanics in normal mode and still get currency for failing. The vast majority of drops can be attained (over a long period of time ofc) without ever defeating a single boss.

- Time to befriend some competent PvE players then or find a new guild/a guild just for raids (you have 5 slots) or join forces with another small guild or invite pugs or …

- Yes.

- “Play how you want, you will win anyway” and “Challenging content” do not mix, as shown in every instanced 5 man PvE content they ever released.

5. Be glad that you are not a WvW player.

sephiroth.4217:

Amenaza.8346:

Its especially laughable coming from ppl with thousands of play hours…even if you shelled out 50$ for NOTHING you would still have struck a pretty good deal time/cost wise.

I shelled out hundreds of dollars for my playstation, if they locked up the basic features to it until I purchased the latest software update, I would be furious.

If you buy a console, the basic features are already all disabled, but thats not the point. If you play on your PS offline it does not generate any cost or use any services that would have to be provided. In case you play online, there are additional cost involved (aka maintaining the PSN) which you already pay montly/yearly with your PSN membership.
GW2 also has continous costs such as general dev time, content updates (the actual game content that was added since launch is more than other games provide in a new expansion), maintaining the servers which are not covered by a monthly fee. All this was included in your first purchase.
Besides, you can still access most of the core game, it just became less rewarding.

It’s hard for me to defend Anet on that matter, since I really hate what they did to WvW (or did not) over the years in general and HoT specifically, but when it comes to pricing, I don’t see anything that is ‘unfair’, quite the opposite.

Sol.4310:

Ancestral Grace, only bugs out if you blast a field. Just put down water field and blast it and you’re in combat. All Combat Only traits can be used, using Clarion Bond with “we Heal As One” you can get Fury/15 Might/Swiftness/Regen + Sigils Leaching/Doom before you even reach the fight. Lucky no one MM isn’t meta atm.

As a main ranger in basically every game mode I can tell you that Ancestral Grace has put me in combat multiple hundred times without blasting or interacting with anything visible and continues doing so in the current build.
To add insult to injury, it can happen that rangers in general respawn in combat, because upon respawing , the pet revives at the old location for a short period of time, triggering any traps or getting conditions that are applied instantly. You then respawn being in combat with a pet half dead. Combined with the Ancestral Grace BS I have once managed to walk from spawn to homepoint completely in combat.

Because in its core, GW2 is a single player game with the option to have other people around you, not as a necessity. There are no “roles” one could fail in a dungeon, no ninja looting/need rolling, everything is carefully separated so you dont interfere with other ppls game. Most of the dungeons are basically soloable, the ones that are not have gating mechanisms that physically require a second/third body to stand somewhere or use a switch. Apart from some world bosses and meta events, the open world does not require any cooperation at all.

Dont fool yourself, the ppl playing GW2 are not “more mature” or better human beings or any crap like that, they just have less reasons to be angry at each other.

Its especially laughable coming from ppl with thousands of play hours…even if you shelled out 50$ for NOTHING you would still have struck a pretty good deal time/cost wise.

My honest answer to this is: Thief will never be in a good spot because it is impossible to balance stealth based classes well, at least regarding how stealth works in this game and how many aspects have to be considered (and Anet has moved away from separating the game modes functionality-wise). Therefore, as long as thief is basically the stealth class , depending on stealth for core class mechanics it will either suck or be too strong, currently the former.
Just ask yourself why a reveal skill/stealth counter is automatically a thief counter whereas other forms of countering game mechanics (block, reflect, projectile deny) although very strong in some scenarios can not be considered an automatic counter for other classes.

Thief should be redesigned, focusing more on their actual class mechanic steal (or whatever works), while granting access to utility stealth (mesmer, ranger, engi). Then there will be a chance for a well rounded thief class.

As a WvW and SPvP player, I love my druid to death and would not in the world trade it for “Pew Pew Ranger 3.0”. Let them have their gimpy builds, the druid is unique in what the profession does. “Dedicated Healer” is not a correct description.

Linken.6345:

Yea so you expect to get good ping while still spvping and wvw against the same servers you do now.
Explain to me how mate?

darkace.8925:

I can’t help but feel some of you guys picked up Commander Tags for all the wrong reasons.

This.

It also should be blatantly obvious for anyone that the commander was designed for WvW when looking at the whole squad system, icons, commands (supplyinfo / squadinfo). It also costs WvW-only currency. The instances in PvE where a comm would actually be required are few and most of the time require additional coordination anyway (triple trouble). Don’t believe me? Tag up at teq and command wrong on purpose – lets see how many players will actually follow you and how many will tell you to kitten off and win the event on their own.

The ability to mark a group’s location on the map can be helpful for newer players which alone should not cost 300g (this is why i thenk the mentor in its current implementation is a good idea – better filtering options would be nice though). If you really shelled out 300 gold just for having that in PvE, you were not short of money in the first place and deliberately paid full price for only a fraction of functionality and prestige.

Your BrainHex Class is Conqueror.

Your BrainHex Class Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Conqueror-Daredevil.

You like defeating impossibly difficult foes, struggling until you eventually achieve victory, and beating other players as well as rushing around at heights or high speed while you are still in control.

Each BrainHex Class also has an Exception, which describes what you dislike about playing games. Your Exceptions are:

» No Commitment: You dislike being asked to complete everything, preferring to pick and choose which tasks you will attempt, or simply messing around with a game.

Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Conqueror: 20
Daredevil: 16
Mastermind: 11
Socialiser: 10
Survivor: 9
Seeker: 3
Achiever: -4

Fits like a glove and is hardly surprising for me.

As someone who actually works in real research involving this topic (player types and gamification), I can tell you that the bartle classification, although well known and often cited, is quite outdated and unreliable. The questions determining your bartle type are designed with very old game design elements in mind (originally dating back to the era of MUDs) and thus it is hard to answer them conclusively. Also, the categories proposed by bartle are both arbitrary and coarse to really provide any solid basis for argumentation (regarding further research – as a random item of interest they are fine enough).

There are other modern approaches I could recommend if you are interested in this topic, such as BrainHex, which provides an actual biological component in the form of brain activity and combines it with player types.

TyPin.9860:

Again. The problem isn’t the number of stats that go into condition damage. To bring this up already highlights the lack of understanding. Condition damage requires less stats (in some cases it only barely does), because it works different than power damage. The biggest issues are: Condition damage works over time and can be cleansed. So after one applied conditions, the “future” damage can be removed. This is different to power damage, which cannot be removed after it was applied.

The problem with this reasoning is it’s one-sidedness. Sure, once applied power damage cannot be removed, only healed. There are other, additional factors though that mitigate or punish power damage and dont apply to condition damage such as protection, toughness, retaliation, weakness on enemy and a lot of “invulnerability skills” that only prevent direct damage. This is further amplified by the fact that a lot of condition applying attacks are unblockable (e.g. all traps) which also adds aegis, reflections and other block skills to the list.
In addition to that, in some significant cases the number of successful attacks required to apply conditions for X damage is a lot smaller than the number of successful power attacks required for X damage. This already balances the fact that conditions can be cleansed and a relevant part of their damage removed.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

(still effectively meaningless as it is highly dependent on other players, the boons you are given, whether or not the boss has 25 stacks of vuln, whether or not you have conditions affecting you, slowing/preventing your actions, or slowing/preventing your movement. Ignoring all of that, already have a combat log that shows your damage output)

Well exactly that is my point. People will get their data if they want to – anet could make sure that it is meaningful and correct data. All this (boon/condition etc.) can be aggregated correctly in the game so there is no need to rely on outside derivation.
You can’t “not support elitism”, you can only either support 3rd party by making no features available ingame or provide clear data for your players directly.

No, it is not “less elitism” at the moment and ppl already get replaced by those types during the run. Just right now it is “Not enough damage on this boss. Ranger reroll or kick” instead of “Warrior was obv only spamming 1 and not using any skills. Contribute or kick”.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

A dps meter is not needed. It provides no real benefit. It’s beyond pointless except as an excuse to kick players that aren’t outputting the damage someone thinks they should be. Further, it would then devolve into ‘No, your class outputs the least amount of direct damage so you cannot come’. We already have things like this, there is no need for Anet to actively encourage this.

Kill.3458:

Without a doubt, given the human proclivity to abuse and take advantage of resources alloted to us, it wouldn’t be long before your clever solution devolved into an out burst of “your DPS is slightly behind everyone else’s by 5%(given the ascended boost), clearly you aren’t ready for this” kicked from squad. Now I do know their are those who would gladly responsibly use the device but I doubt you’ll see much of those people outside of organized raiding groups/guilds. Your solution rewards the few and may very well intoxicate the many given the power it alots people. ANet wanted a connected community not a further divided one.

I see those arguments all the time. Why don’t you realzie that this behavior is not new and would certainly not be created by damage meters?
Ppl already get kicked due to AP, weapon set, profession and other bs metrics. There are and will be 3rd party tools that provide more reliable metrics (like gw efficiency) and those will be used by ambitioned players to improve their party/raid and toxic players as a mean to flame, harass and kick. This has already started and you won’t stop it.

Built in metrics (i refrain from DPS meters since there is more info about the raid i am interested in, not just DPS) would not change a thing about toxicity. It would just provide a better tool for everybody to use. I’d rather get my info from an ingame source than to trust a 3rd party regarding correctness and available information. But as long as the former is not available, I will fall back to the latter option, as will every other player that enjoys optimization and strives on personal mastery.

The hypocrisy is incredible. People mostly associate the toxic players (sometimes mix them up with ambitioned players that want to play with the like minded and cry “toxic elitist” if they dont want to carry slackers) in WoW with damage meters and pretend that everything is fine here in the oh so better GW2.
Matter of fact is, toxic players exist everywhere, GW2 is no exception, the toxicity is already there in the current system and has always existed, it is not created by damage meters or the like. The difference here is that ppl get kicked or flamed because of vague, nonsensical reasons and prejudice (profession, AP, “ping gear”, uplevel) with no means to prove their worth. Whole professions are just excluded mostly based on random assumptions – try to find a high fractal group while not playing within the 1guard – 1war – 2ele – 1thief meta, because someone somwhere wrote that this is the best. Having actual numbers relevant for GW2 (not just damage; healing, boon uptime/assisted dmg, #downed, interrupts, dmg prevention by dodge/reflection etc.) would not only allow for fair comparisons and fact checking (even if it is only for yourself) but also make glaring issuses in class balance obvious as soon as they arise.

Adding those meaningful statistics to the new UI would go a long way with practically no downside for anyone with honest intentions.

This guide perfectly illustrates the core problems with stealth in this game in general and thief in particular which i would like to illustrate here.
Note: I dont think that stealth is overpowered but badly designed.

Mandatory to counter, way harder to counter than to use.
First of all, what you described and what works vs one thief build might be considered difficult or at least not “easy”. It needs memorization, practice and routine. Not an issue as such, but the effort on the thief side is basically non existent compared to the non stealth class in order to have a balanced fight. As you have written yourself, this way of countering stealth wont net you a win just by itself; even if everything goes by plan. On the other hand, playing with stealth vs. someone who can not really counter stealth provides hardly a challenge.

Stealth misplays are not really punished while anti-stealth misplays are.
Secondly, stealth is forgiving while countering stealth is not. Miscounted or slightly mistimed your dodge? Too bad, you eat the full burst, have to blow a stun break or another important cooldown. Stealthed thief backstabbing someone with aegis up or block/invulnerability/evade skill? Np bro, try again since the backstab is blocked/dmg prevented, it does not count as a damaging attack and you can remain stealthed.

Stealth leaves the initiative up to the stealth class, non-stealthers have to react.
If not greatly outnumbered, stealth users basically can decide whether they want to fight or not and to some extend, whether they want to continue the fight or not. Granted, in spvp i do not care for a thief running away as i get to cap the point, but in roaming/wvw this simply leaves the non-stealthers frustrated as they are more or less at the whim of the stealther. Proactive tactics vs stealth barely exist and are not easy to pull off sucessfully, which is also reflected in your guide which almost exclusively tells how to answer, not to threaten.

Thief is too dependant on stealth.
The way anet has designed this class, they basically can not hit or change stealth without fundamentally changing or damaging thief. Thiefs have to rely on stealth for resources, regen/healing and skill enable. This results in further terrible design; providing classes with easy and strong stealth counters such as spammable mass reveal they automatically provide them with no-brainer thief counters. The solution would require a fundamental change in the current thief design: Making stealth an optional utility asset (as it is for the mesmer) and focusing on something else, for example the thief class mechanic steal (e.g. providing different steals such as the mesmer has different shatters).

lordkrall.7241:

“I’m not looking for an answer like, “No, you should play what you like to play, there is no best spec.””

So you basically only want an answer that say: Yes they will replace the old ones?

Reading comprehension: F
He wants to know whether or not the new specs will have an impact on (read: replace) the old meta builds, without having the thread cluttered with a discussion about meta itself.

Imho this will depend on the game mode, since for example the druid will be a strong contender in pvp situations (especially in the WvW melee train) while i doubt that the class will have an impact in the old zerker dungeons.
Scrapper however is a strict upgrade imho and will replace the old engi.
For daredevil it is impossible to tell since anet wants to implement significant changes up to release.

Raistlin.3210:

AlliedKhajiit.2794:

every suggestion made by OP has been decided by the majority of the community that they’re unwelcome suggestions and tons of players would probably quit if they came around
moderators pls close thread, im sick of hearing the same suggestions every time I visit the forums

decided by the very small handful of people that actually use the forums you mean?

and if this is a on-going topic like you say , your point is null and void
that just proves this is something people want

either way warcraft is a dated game, so saying “go back to wow” is just plain ol kittened

and even if (which i doubt and would bet 1 mill bucks on) they added a few of these things and lost all of the people that they have had since launch , the amount of people they would gain would overshadow that amount x10

You have to take the biting reflex of the vocal forum community into account. As soon as they even see a comparison to that other MMO, everyone goes bananas, tells you to play another game and how important it is that GW2 is different.
People are too shortsighted to see that there is a benefit in copying mechanics that are proven to work while maintaining the unique flavor of this game.

I.e. there is no rational reason in not allowing UI customization. Best solution would be a fully customizable UI provided by ANet (such as SWTOR had), but if they lack the resources to provide this, I’d rather have 3rd party customization addons than no option for that at all. This is a PvP thing mostly and I get why this is hard to understand coming from a pure PvE point of view. I want to fight the player, not the interface.

Don’t get me started on damage meters, the hypocrisy is incredible. People mostly associate the toxic players in WoW with it (sometimes mix them up with ambitioned players that want to play with the like minded and cry “toxic elitist” if they dont want to carry slackers) and pretend that everything is fine here in the oh so different GW2.
Matter of fact is, toxic players exist everywhere, GW2 is no exception, the toxicity is already there in the current system and has always existed. The difference is that ppl get kicked or flamed because of vague, nonsensical reasons and prejudice (profession, AP, “ping gear”, uplevel) with no means to prove their worth. Whole professions are just excluded mostly based on random assumptions – try to find a high fractal group while not playing within the 1guard – 1war – 2ele – 1thief meta, because someone somwhere wrote that this is the best. Having actual numbers relevant for GW2 (not just damage; healing, boon uptime/assisted dmg, #downed, interrupts, dmg prevention by dodge/reflection etc.) would not only allow for fair comparisons and fact checking (even if it is only for yourself) but also make glaring issuses in class balance obvious as soon as they arise.

Same for the trinity. I personally do not want to go back to mandatory healers + tanks to complete content and the whole PvP dynamic would suffer if they ever implemented it. Why does it come up all the time? Because people like to have a role and a specific task they can excel in. This abstract concept is not bad in itself and does not necessarily lead to the trinity – trinity is just one (traditional) implementation of it – and would certainly not turn GW2 into a clone of that other game; it would actually benefit the PvE gameplay. The situation at hand is that regarding efficiency almost every encounter comes down to “do as much damage as you can before either you or the boss dies” for everyone. One can not seriously argue that this is in any way challenging or superior in its design. Yes, this problem is also benefitted by bad pathing and AI, but would not change in its core essence if those were improved.

But it sounds like that other game so NO NO NO NEVER WE ARE SO DIFFERENT EVERYTHING FINE PRAISE ANET.

Legally speaking, nobody except ANet owns anything in this game, you even don’t own your own account (technically you acquired right of usage, not the account itself). Because of that, there won’t be any official action whatsoever regarding guild possession, since nobody is entitled to any guild ownership.
So in terms of control it boils down to whoever holds the administrative rights, which, according to your story, is clearly you and nobody else. The others have forfeited their means of influence.

The only thing you have to decide for yourself is whether or not you want to “honor” the fact that they founded the guild and think that as creators they should always be entitled to “claim” it as they please. This would be purely out of respect and goodwill on your side, nothing else. Their acts however have shown that they do not respect you and therefore (at least in my book) do not deserve that option. In fact, depending on how serious they offended you with the guild message of the day, you could report this as ingame harassment which ANet indeed cares about in contrast to guild ownership.

Seera.5916:

Amenaza.8346:

Although i do not mind ppl selling dungeons per se (and would advocate against a ban), i really hate the fact that i cant filter the lfg to exclude them, as im not interested in buying any paths. It is annoying that they share the same space with “legitimate” parties.

The only problem with that is anything that would do that would give some players the assumption that ANet would reimburse them if they got scammed and that ANet fully supports dungeon selling. ANet neither supports nor prohibits dungeon selling. They do prohibit scamming, so while if you have proof that a scam took place, they won’t replace your gold but they will punish the scammer.

I know that and i would not ask for a specific sell filter. Just a text field where you can exclude one or multiple strings, like the google “-” command. I could hide the sellers, others could hide “meta” and grinders could hide “story” or unwanted paths. A simple, easy to implement feature that would greatly improve the usability of the lfg tool with no downside i could imagine at the moment.

laokoko.7403:

Nevermore.5487:

I still don’t understand why would anyone pay to dungeon when you can find a party for free

They can actaully do the dungeon. Or farm more money else where and buy the dungeon.

A bad pug for arah could take forever for many people. Or they can farm SW or maize blam and make much more money faster. Or even credit card or in game gambling.

Or they can access (read: loot) gated content like high lvl fractals.

Although i do not mind ppl selling dungeons per se (and would advocate against a ban), i really hate the fact that i cant filter the lfg to exclude them, as im not interested in buying any paths. It is annoying that they share the same space with “legitimate” parties.

As a passionate WvW player I am very happy that this new system of free Badges provides an alternative for PvE-Zerkers, who are not really interested in actual WvW to begin with, so they dont clog up the queues anymore.
And given the fact that our guild raid yields somthing in between of 70-200 badges within 3-5 hours (one evening), I could not care less about an extra of 100 badges.

To those arguing about the legendary-game-coverage: It might have been a concept before release that crafting a legendary would require you to ‘master’ all aspects of the game, but since release anet clearly moved away from that towards the opposite. Hypothetically you could just buy one via real money, without playing the game at all. Or by just farming gold in CoF, flipping the TP (which also could be argued as not playing the game) or [insert secret gold-grinding here]. Anything else is riddled with abysmal rng all over the place, because anet has removed any reliable method of retrieving certain crafting materials.
So the free badges can in fact be seen as a consistent change in the spirit of pidgeonholing players into a tiny fraction of the game if they ever want to acquire a legendary.

Indigus.9528:

quenoz.3859:

Neil.6138:

So maybe MS and AG can see the lighter side of the GH blob last night:

Fury’s open mic night

One of the saddest posts & videos ever.

Why so serious? This is not made by a fury member nor does it state anything about your guild. Its supposed to be a funny look at yesterdays’ open-mic event.

Well, it is just sad that the events displayed in the video are considered something worth of a funny lookback or even posting. If I personally had participated in that ‘event’, I would have been bored and disappointed by the lack of quality fight or challenge, judging by this highlight compilation…but whatever floats your boat I guess.

No offense intended against you or your guild.

killimandros.5087:

“schnabelangst in die laderhosen”

This expression does not make any sense at all in german^^ and its Lederhosen btw.

AM…seriously the most boring night of WvW in a long time. They dont even want to fight when its 30 vs 20 in their favor…no, they run to their tower and build AC or come back with 60.
I know, everybody is entitled to their own playstyle, but i really dont see how this amount of blob and the resultung lag/skilldelay can be fun for anyone.
At least we had some really awesome matchups in the past weeks so i wont complain, just taking a break for one week.

Doug.9628:

with that shout trait and 10 in BM rangers can give the party perm swiftness and regen only by using the guard shout, which gives your pets perma prot as well. That’s not insignificant.

You seriously need to look at the bigger picture, not just on one skill and tell us “it does x y and z, thats not nothing! (or thats not insignificant)” – well of course it is something but compare it to other professions.
In your case a ranger has to spend 30 trait points and a grandmaster trait to make the shouts actually affect the party (instead of pet only) to begin with. In addition to that the party bonus is mediocre at best and redundant on top of that, because there are so many ways to gain regeneration (and swiftness is just unneccessary in most cases) – including our own water field Healing Spring.

Then have a look at Warrior or Guardian shouts – they are beneficial for the whole party without any trait point spent and can provide crucial boons like stability or protection. Granted, the uptime is less but id rather take 5sec stability on demand compared to 20sec regen and swiftness in a dungeon. For WvW stability or condition remove on shout is even more important – at least when running in organized guild groups.
And lets assume our Guardian also wants to spend 30 trait points in Honor to improve the shouts via Pure of Voice (Allies affected by shouts convert one condition to a boon. – which alone is significantly better than Nature’s Voice). Honor also includes the 20% shout recharge reduction and overall provides superior party support. Compare that to Nature Magic, a traitline centered around our gimpy spirits (that dont survive any serious encounter) and some ego stuff.

So when it comes to efficiency, why on earth would you pick that shout-supporting ranger over a shout supporting guardian?

OP is right and wrong at the same time.
I play a Ranger myself and yes, the damage output of some pets was too high just for speccing 30 in beastmastery and going full heal/tank with the rest.

BUT (and this is a tremendous but)
good players can easily avoid the pet damage and there is nothing you (=the ranger) can do about it , because there is no way to control out pets. Heck, even the command is more like a mild suggestion “Terrifying Howl you say? Uhm just let me finish my channel here and ill get back to you in a sec or two”.
Yeah, it might seem overpowered to stomp 3 braindead potatoes without actually paying attention but complaining about it is a bit like complaining about warrior 100b in pvp because it deals so much damage…

I have dueled some really experienced elementalists as well as thiefs as a BM and lost most fights simply because the pet did not hit them one single time with a seriously damaging attack. I won some with a tricky immobilize → pet swap → stealth → hilt bash → sick em combo which took my enemies by surprise (and of course is super easy to land vs. the above mentioned classes… ), but that was more like a one trick pony and does not work on someone who is expecting you to try this.
Besides that, an ele can kite your pet until tomorrow and thiefs…stealth renders all melee pets useless and s/d can blink/shadowstep all day making it even worse. Record in uselessness holds the raven for being locked in the f2 animation for 11sec because it could not hit the thief.

I would gladly take reduced pet damage in exchange for an advanced pet control or significantly improved ai, but this is just a stupid, mindless nerfbat that shows (again) that the developers dont give a rats kitten about the ranger and people have the right to raise their concerns about this.

The “buffs” on longbow are a joke because it still is a lackluster skillset with bad scaling. Axe 4 is OK i guess but we will see.
Spirits? Yay, one trait merged (in fact a good decision). Does not change the fact that spirits are squishy as hell and can be killed along the way. Even the elite spirit dies in a few seconds if your opponent is smart enough to focus it down first before dealing with you.

Ive long before given up on the idea of using my ranger in PvE/dungeons simply because my guardian is so much more useful in most scenarios, hands down. This nerf also hits the pve rangers, which is totally uncalled for. Whats with all that promises about making rangers more viable in dungeons by eliminating some fundamental flaws? Hey, now we will have a Grandmaster trait that allows us to apply regeneration and swiftness, the most useful boons in a dungeon run. I would totally pick that over Stand Your Ground, Hold The Line or Save Yourselves with Pure of Voice traited and maybe a soldier rune. Oh right, I wouldn’t.

And dont get me started on the short bow.

Thanks for the totally awesome fights on AG BL this night. At one point our commander was like "Hmmm did we even cap anything besides some supply camps? Ahh what the hell, who cares… [Yak] and [TUP] are still here and up for a fight, lets kick some * "
So, greetings to those two guilds and [XxX] as well as [QQ] who joined the fun later.

This is the coolest matchup we’ve had in a long time, although our night shift decides it in our favor – but i would say the same if we were 3rd place.

Shifty.3412:

Our blob? For pretty much the whole night we were the only 20 people on the border

Yeah, right. 20 ppl.
(this was shortly before you guys tried to take our garrison, so [DeX] is not even in the picture…)

Shifty.3412:

We would rather not, you run with commander tag and 50-60 in total

I loled.
We (25-35) ran without pugs most of the time and even sent them away to the public commanders

But ofc it was clearly unfair from our side to team up with the rest as you were desperately trying to get our bay with your whole blob.

I dont understand why you have to be so negative about it, we had some awesome fights, sometimes you won, sometimes we did and it was very close in the end.

Michikyou.9617:

*Denying new areas until ‘PVP’ is perfected.

I loled really hard.

The only valid complaint imho would have been the Super Adventure Box, since it breaks the immersion like a pink Charr singing Justin Bieber songs in the temple of Grenth.